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Domain Aliases Bad, 301 Redirects Good

Welcome to part II of our "Google Changes Search Algorithm"! The
Jury is still out, but we believe that Domain
Aliases were responsible for the recent Search Engine
Ranking demotion on Google.

In our last article Google Changes Search Algorithm - Part I we talked about how
our ranking for a certain Keyword Phrase changed
very negatively. We were sent from the first page with a rank of #7
to a rank of over #530. We have some findings to report and it's
very important that you read this article if you have more than one
domain name pointing to your website.

We made some changes in the last 48 hours and we are already
seeing immediate results. We immediately deleted all domain aliases
that we had pointing to CrackGoogle.com. Crackmsn.com,
Crackaol.com, and more. These domains are appropriate and should
indeed point to the website. But since adding, we were whacked from
the first page. After doing some homeworks, we believe we found the
problem. It was not the fact that we had more than one domain that
we felt merited being directed to our site, but rather it appears
that Google was seeing "duplicate content" or duplicate websites.
We should have known better. We know about 301s, we know about
duplicate content. What we didn't know is that the way our aliases
were setup, didn't properly do a 301 redirect. WIthout going into
detail, MAKE SURE, MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE, that if you have more than
one domain point to a "main" domain or your "main" website, that
you are doing a true 301 redirect. I can NOT stress this enough. If
you fail to do so, you will feel the results quickly and painfully.
Read on....

After deleting the aliases less than only 48 hours ago, we have
already climbed back up over, ready for this, WELL OVER 100 places.
We are now in the 400's and climbing rapidly.

But what about our aliases? We like them? We want them? We think
people who directly type them into their browser should be pointed
to our website, so why can't we use them? Is this our fate? The
short answer is NO!

The Solution: 301 Redirects

If you don't know what a 301 redirect is, it's
essentially a permanent redirect. So when Google crawls that
domain, instead of seeing another website with duplicate content,
they are redirected permanently to the domain you have for your
main website, in this case CrackGoogle.com.

You can do a Search for 301 redirects and find plenty of
information. But for the sake of what we needed to do in regards to
our goals, we are going to share some of our code from our
.htaccess file. The .htaccess file is for Apache webservers and is
the secret sauce for doing all sorts of wonderful things for Search
Engine Optimization. (We will be posting a great deal of
information in the coming months for how to use your .htaccess
file, but solely from an SEO perspective.

WIthout further delay, and as promised, the solution. This was
added to the bottom of our .htaccess file. It assumes you have
rewrite engine on. (again, if you don't understand any of this. Do
homework on 301 redirects and .htaccess / apache, and then you can
simply copy and paste the code below and use on your own site. Be
sure to change the domains to reflect the domains you wish to
redirect, etc.)

This concludes Part II, and there will be a Part III which will
include the lastest updates on our new blog at blogspot.com called
CrackGoogleDotCom.BlogSpot.com.
It is our first test of many to see how various blogs and feeds
begin to affect our traffic and Search Engine Rankings. We figured
we should start with blogspot.com because it's owned by Google.
Makes sense.

So check out the blog, it's a good read and currently only has
our first post. The post itself explains whey we only have one post
at the moment. So again, feel free to visit and give it a read, you
might gain something or have something to offer!